don't think: Do Revit

Sunday, January 27, 2013

So I think the news it out already, but Harry Madison (one of the most talented Revit API developers out there) has started his own blog and consulting business for developing Revit API tools.

He has put out a freebie on the Revit Exchange "Image-O-Matic". Which is a nifty little tool to generate an animation of a parametric family. There are a number of interesting possibilities with this tool, you could make a cool family such as the one Harry used for his demo. However another interesting possibility with this tool would be to demonstrate how a family works for the purposes of educating users on how to properly use a family in a project.

So on top of all that he is running a contest until the end of the month, the winner will get a free tool of their choice (some restrictions apply) if they win the content. To win you have to provide the best example of the use of Image-O-Matic.

On another front, I'm working closely with Wes Benn (chairman of RTC), some of the North American committee members and some other folks from the industry for something special at RTC NA 2013. No other details to share yet, but stay tuned!

Thursday, December 06, 2012

So, after almost a week I've mostly dug myself out from the post AU work hangover. For the first time in several years I was quite pleased with the majority of the course I attended, though most of them were dealing with Data and Information, and not specific Revit techniques.

I was however a bit dissapointed with this year's Keynote. I thought last year's was better overall (though the kid was great), however I'm getting tired of hearing Carl Bass tell me the same thing for the last three year running, ie Autodesk is investing in cloud software solutions. Ok, we get it, what else? Oh yeah, you're software is going to share seamless with all products, and they don't want to "restrict our data". Enough, tell me what else is coming! I get the cloud thing we all do, but its also going take you another three to five years to get to full enterprise level support.

So with that thought in mind the folks at Imaginit were kind enough to line up Beau Turner and Matt Mason (two of my favorite guys to chat with) to talk a little bit about where they see things going and why they're leading the software developer they are (which by the way does not have cloud, social or mobile in any product name) and where they seem some intruging possibilities in the not too distant future.

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

I will be headed out to Autodesk University on Sunday and look forward to seeing many of you out there. I'll be kicking around so don't hesitate to look me up either through e-mail, blog comments, or whatever.

Kitchen Island, glass tile backsplash

Kitchen on left, tiled chimney and wood storage on right.

Wood Stove Hearth

Second Floor Foyer

Master Bath Shower (sans glass) and Make-up vanity beyond.

The house is coming along quite nicely, painters are finishing up this week and next, we just need to get our guard rails installed and a few other minor finishing touches, here and there.

Chronicle is kinda like Jing for Autodesk products except is also captures actual command data, so that someone watching the video can also "See" exactly what you did, what your settings were/are and when you did it. I'm really intrigued by this technology as I think it is a great way to easily share with people how to perform a task in Autodesk software.

Now it does look like everything is "public" so that means if you have something you want to "keep in your company" you're still going to have to use tools like Jing. Though I do hope that something like Chronicle advances to where we can choose with whom and how we share our "Chronicles".

Happy chronicling!

Edit: I've since been informed that Chronicles can be marked as "private" so you don't have to share with everyone, you can choose to share with specific people. Which is good news, as this person reminded me though, this is hosted by Autodesk Labs. That said, the more people use it and leverage ti, the more likely Autodesk will be to perpetuate it in some form.

Saturday, October 20, 2012

Who says monkeys can't run a laser scanner? Of course we'll have to see if he can make all the clouds register together. It would have been preferable to do the scans before board and plaster went up, but when you're waiting for fun toys to fall off the back of a battleship you can't be too picky!

Thursday, September 27, 2012

So one limitation that I've encountered with Color Fill Schemes for Rooms has been that you don't really have flexibility in terms of a set of "rules" by which to color, its mostly an all or nothing proposition with regards to a single parameter's value. So this week, it finally occurred to me to try filters to color rooms. I tried several view setting with no luck. In my case I wanted to color some very specific rooms all the same, and while I could have used room name, and made each unique room the same color, and turned all the others off, that seemed like alot of work to me. There had to be a way to make filters work!

It finally occurred to me to apply the filter with a color scheme applied to the view. Viola! My filter changed the color of my target room(s). That still left me with the issue of how to only color the rooms targeted with the filter. This actually turned out to be quite simple, rather then turn the rooms off, I made them "white". The white is a good "trick", it means that I can reduce my color scheme to a parameter with fewer values, think Department Names rather than Room Names, you could even create a parameter for rooms to which you assign the same value. With all rooms still visible, but set to white, now I have the freedom to colors rooms based on whatever Filter Rules I can dream up, thus allowing me to effectively right conditional statements to group rooms together under the same color or pattern which a single value would not typically allow.

Another silly little thing I encountered this week. I needed a schedule to contain project information, in this case with a list of areas. I actually needed the Project Name with each row of data (don't ask too many questions). What is one to do? I remembered that a couple of weeks ago when working with schedules that "Project Information" was a valid choice in the schedule field's tab combo box. This time though, I created a new schedule and it wasn't there! Then it occurred to me to check the "include linked files" box. Once again, presto! I had project information available to schedule with my areas. Now ironically I don't actually need to schedule anything from my linked file(s), but that is ok, I can deal with that one way or another. I do somewhat understand why these choices only become available when choosing to include linked file data, but at the same time it is a bit of a needless limitation, I can't think of any good reason why Project Information should not always be a valid choice.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

So, was working on Type Catalogs today and came across an interesting quirk. If you're creating a type catalog that is going to populate built-in parameters you have to make sure that while creating the family you've put a value into that parameter at some point (even if you want to leave it blank in the end). It would seem that the blank parameters carry some type of null value by default. For instance my Type Catalog was supposed to populate the "Description" parameter, however I never bothered plugging any data in, as I knew I was just going to build a Type Catalog. However, when I went to load the family the family loaded properly, but I got a warning that the Description parameter did not exist! Obviously as a built-in parameter it is/was there. When I went back to the family, I added a value to the Description parameter, saved, deleted the value, and magically the Type Catalog worked correctly. The interesting thing to note here is that once a value is added it can be deleted, but its no longer a <null> value, so it will carry through the load process when using a Type Catalog.

As another update, house construction is progressing, interior fitout is coming along, cabinets are installed and painting is just getting started.

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